Afghan Election Results Due Today as Abdullah Seeking Delay

Abdullah Abdullah, a former foreign minister who won the first round of voting in April, has accused the election body of fraud and has boycotted the results. Photographer: Wakil Kohsar/AFP via Getty Images

July 7 (Bloomberg) -- Afghan election authorities are due
to unveil preliminary results of a presidential runoff after a
five-day delay as Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai rejected a coalition
with his main rival, a move that may spark protests.

Abdullah Abdullah, a former foreign minister who won the
first round of voting in April, is boycotting the results after
accusing the Independent Election Commission of Afghanistan of
stuffing ballot boxes in favor of Ghani, a former World Bank
economist. His camp wants today’s announcement delayed again.

“We will not accept the preliminary results until clean
votes are separated from fraudulent votes,” Abdullah told
reporters in Kabul yesterday. “The international community
wants a government based on legitimate votes.”

Failure to reach a deal threatens to trigger violence in
one of Asia’s poorest countries and delay the signing of a pact
that’s needed to keep U.S. troops in Afghanistan beyond this
year and secure billions of dollars in aid. Ghani has said the
funds are essential to pay Afghan soldiers as they fight Taliban
insurgents who ran the country before the U.S. invasion in 2001.

“A disputed result could threaten the country’s fragile
democracy and stability,” Faizullah Jalal, an economics
professor at Kabul University, said by phone. “The
international community must intervene and coordinate with
Afghan institutions to find a way for its resolution otherwise
we may experience another civil war and national crisis.”

Kerry Call

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry last week called
President Hamid Karzai, who refused to sign the troop pact, and
stressed the importance of national unity and a peaceful
election process.

“We have long stated our support for a credible,
transparent and inclusive process that is broadly supported by
the Afghan people and which produces a president who can govern
the country,” the State Department said in a statement. “We
call on all sides to work toward this goal and to avoid steps
that undermine national unity.”

The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan said
last month the elections “were better managed and more advanced
than those previously” and called on Abdullah to cooperate in
the vote-counting process. It also warned against moves from
either side that could ignite ethnic conflict.

Karzai, in power since 2001, is constitutionally barred
from standing for a third term. Abdullah won 45 percent of seven
million votes in the first round of the election on April 5,
with Ghani taking 32 percent, both falling short of the 50
percent needed to avoid a runoff.

Protest Risk

“We’ve seen a measure of calm on the streets of Kabul in
recent days as the two camps talk about how to break the
political standoff,” said Graeme Smith, a senior analyst at the
International Crisis Group in Kabul. “If preliminary results
are announced on Monday, as promised, we could see another round
of protests with a potential for violence.”

The election results will be announced at 2 p.m. in Kabul,
Marzia Siddiqi Salim, an election commission spokeswoman, said
in a statement today.

Abdullah, who finished second in the 2009 election, accused
Karzai of intervening in the runoff and has sought to void about
2.5 million votes in southern and eastern regions, saying the
number of ballots exceeded the population in certain areas. One
senior election official he had accused of fraud resigned last
month.

Delay Urged

If the results are announced today, they would include
fraudulent ballots, according to Sayed Fazel Sancharaki, a
spokesman for Abdullah’s camp.

“It will have very negative and problematic consequences
in the country,” Sancharaki said by phone, referring to an
announcement of election results today. “It must be delayed
again.”

Ghani, who has also submitted election complaints, urged
Abdullah to rejoin the vote-counting process.

“The date of July 7 is not debatable, and irreversible for
us,” Ghani, a former finance minister, told reporters in Kabul
on July 5. “People are waiting for the election results to be
announced and it cannot be postponed again.”

The delay in announcing results occurred because of
investigations and recounting at about 2,000 polling stations
across 30 provinces, Ahmad Yusuf Nuristani, the election body’s
chairman, said on July 2. Final results are now scheduled for
July 24, he said the following day.

Ethnic Tension

Abdullah, 53, is half Pashtun and half Tajik. He was a
close aide to Northern Alliance commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, an
ethnic Tajik seen by many Afghans as a national hero for
fighting against Soviet occupiers in the 1980s and the Taliban
in the 1990s.

Ghani is an ethnic Pashtun who served as Afghanistan’s
finance minister from 2002-2004 and finished fourth in the 2009
election. He holds a doctorate in cultural anthropology from
Columbia University in New York.

Pashtuns account for 42 percent of Afghanistan’s 32 million
people, while Tajiks make up 27 percent, according to the CIA
World Factbook. In the 1990s, after the Soviet Union withdrew,
factional fighting killed thousands of people and led ultimately
to the Taliban regime, which was ousted by the U.S. after the
attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.